He'll Eat Anything

A sucker for a man who understands the important things, I became a
Buck 65 fanatic six minutes into the fourth quadrant of 2002's
Square: "Food/It puts me in a good mood/It keeps me goin'/When
under strains/Ain't nothin' worse than hunger pains." So he has the
economics under his belt--how about the aesthetics? "Fill my dishes
with delicious fish and brown rice/Sounds nice but I can't argue with
barbecue"--culturally ecumenical. "I'm droolin' for tabouli
salad"--ethnic for a Maritimer. "I can manage to do damage to a
sandwich/Marshmallows peanut butter and bananas/And a big plate of
gnocchi/If I'm lucky with pita bread"--bingo. Note that Buck, amid the
blizzard of internal rhymes that blankets his menu, not only
pronounces "gnocchi" properly, "nyucky" to go with "lucky," but places
the medium-obscure potato pasta directly after a dish fit for a
King. The Nova Scotian rapper has no Elvis dreams. But he respects
Elvis's reality.

"Food" so touched my heart that ever since I've wanted to stuff
Richard Terfry's lanky frame into my Honda Civic and show him the
cuisines of Queens--Broadway Jackson Heights, or that Peruvian chicken
place in Elmhurst. He was easy, but scheduling wasn't, so in the end
we settled for the Peruvian on First and 6th in late January, just
before Terfry ended a six-month Manhattan residency and flew to Paris
to lay down vocals for the album he swears will be out in May. At my
wife's and my urging--we both craved fish--our guest ordered the
chicken. But he ate everything with gusto--octopus and tamalitos,
bites of our ceviche and tacu tacu. With water. At 32, Terfry has
never had a drink--not alcohol, not even coffee. Nor
smoked--anything. Nor taken aspirin or any other medication. Yet to
call him straight-edge would be absurd. His appetite's too big.

I've designated Terfry a rapper because that's what he is. But
though his delight in rhymes that surpass Madlib's or Eminem's in
technical complexity continues, underground hip-hop is no longer his
scene. A lower-middle-class (if that) country boy whose dad owned a
filling station and whose deeply mourned mom did office work, he
wrecked his knee before he could go pro as a shortstop, then moved to
Halifax, an Underground Railroad terminus harboring Canada's largest
indigenous black population. There he worked for a hotel and a
magazine store and came this close to being the first Terfry to
graduate college (in biology--one younger sister's now a dentist,
another on her way). He also broadcast a long-running hip-hop show and
created music as a triple threat--rapping-DJ'ing-producing a
substantial catalog for a guy you've barely heard of. Suitably snotty
early on, he was attracted to hip-hop because it said a rube unable to
sing or play an instrument could be a musician anyway. Even in the
'90s, when he'd speed up his voice in the mix to smooth it out, his
flow was less than liquescent. But you should hear him make "Like
pointless sexual deviance and joints this flexible" scan.

Buck 65 is so clearly a talent that over the years he's gotten not
just Voice props but up-and-comer squibs in Spin and
Stone, and in 2003 Talkin' Honky Blues won a Canadian
Juno Award--half band-backed, it was accounted "alternative," not
"rap." Sojourns in Paris and London have earned him a European
audience, and a few weeks ago he finally made his U.S.-major debut on
V2 with the oddly effective compilation This Right Here Is Buck
65. Yet his buzz has been sufficiently protracted and diffuse to
make an admirer wonder just exactly when he'll be famous. For years
he's criticized the insularity of hip-hop (often carelessly, I
believe), and hip-hop is turf-proud enough to resent him for it. When
he can, he raps with a customized Halifax alt-rock band featuring
pedal steel, but the nine o'clock shows he played every Tuesday in
December at the singer-songwriter haven Sin-é are standard: solo with
turntables and CD-ROMs, featuring scratch interludes stretched to
their limits.

Between his athletic body and his droll raconteuring--the stories
vary markedly: at Sin-é in January he told a spanking new Serge
Gainsbourg, while a Mick Jagger pantomine that got big laughs in
September was reduced to a chorus--Terfry is special enough live to
reach Italians and Spaniards. Still, how long he can just rap is a
question he'll confront on his next album by doing some singing, and
who knows how that will turn out? Recorded with Tortoise, legendary
turntablist D-Styles, and other alt bigshots, that true U.S. debut
could make or undo him here. Right now, he and his adored and
beauteous French fiancée--the great-granddaughter of dada
paterfamilias Francis Picabia, pretty classy for a guy whose own dad
pumped gas--are touring the Southeast breaking ground for it.

Untreated, Buck 65's gravelly voice sounds ancient, and combined
with his slices of life and his waggish stage business--I once saw him
light himself holding an orange worklamp in one hand--elicits Tom
Waits comparisons. But neither Waits nor another acknowledged
influence, David Lynch, comes near his heart. Where Waits's Jersey
girls are hyperromantic verging on grotesque, Buck 65's weirdest
eccentrics come out as ordinary people, and he's capable of wrenching
nakedness--"What am I supposed to do? I need another year/There comes
times every day I need to have my mother here" is just a sample of
what he spilled when his mom died in 1999. As he becomes a full-time
artist, the life he looks around and writes about becomes more
countercultural. Talkin' Honky Blues turns seven times to the
Seine, where much of it was written. Scattered among the river's
"stranded, branded, weathered, and abandoned" are a beautiful suicide,
a deaf violinist, a one-eyed Communist on a bicycle, and a love
poem. Then, as the album winds down, there are two haunting little
pieces of electronica, a song that begins "When I cheated on Sara" and
tells all, and a guide to shoeshine technique: "Craftsmanship is a
quality that some lack/You got to give people a reason for them to
come back." That's what he's counting on.